


Oxymoronic

by mm01



Series: // [1]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Gen, POV Andrew Minyard, convos with bee, not much happens. but neil needs a haircut also i love them, past andrew, rooftop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 15:12:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13954278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mm01/pseuds/mm01
Summary: Sober now, Bee near tops his list of tolerable people - which starts with Renee and ends with Nicky - because she knows when to stop prodding. Neil does not. Or more accurately: he knows, and prods further still.Neil is not a tolerable person.





	Oxymoronic

Andrew has long-since grown accustomed to the weight of eyes on his back. 

His neck, his legs, his hair. 

It no longer repulses him. Sometimes—clinically, numbly—he examines that empty place that does not feel. He probes. It's less the absence of feeling than it is a self-imposed, violent sort of apathy, he thinks wryly. Oxymoronic, he is. 

If not just fucking moronic. 

“Affected emptiness,” Bee called it - she chose her words carefully - “is something of a fool-proof coping mechanism. Shut off what hurts and nothing can hurt you. No one can hurt you.” 

His own mental protective armour. It’s a very sad story.

The memory of Aaron’s first letter: rife with a child’s naivety, with the promise that he’d never known, he’d never been told, and he wanted a brother more than anything else, and when could they meet? Never, as far as Andrew was concerned.

Drake had wanted a brother, too. Andrew would not hand-deliver him another. He gave Luther Hemmick a secret, which did not work; he robbed a gas station and broke seven car windows with a baseball bat, which did.

Meek AJ Doe was ten signatures from a name change and a family when he turned inside out. Angry and volatile, violated, seething and spitting and outwardly destructive. Violence and frenzy with purpose. 

Then came juvie. And then came early parole, and the fall-through of the adoption and Aaron, and the first promise he’d ever made, and the vehement, all-encompassing need to keep his word because life was bullshit and his rage so potent it splintered, and because no one had ever kept a promise to him - to keep him, to protect him, to understand and believe him. 

Nicky thinks he’s crazy. Aaron thinks he’s fucked up beyond belief and incapable of self-reflection or regret. They’re both half right, thinks Andrew.

Andrew does not regret. He makes a measured choice and he deals with the consequences. 

Juvie taught him restraint. Juvie taught him how to school his features into a mask of impassivity, how to utilize pain as the tool it ultimately was. People used pain to get power. Andrew had only ever wanted control.

And yet: here he was now, opening himself up to be hurt. Again.

Idiotic.

He strikes a match and lights up, stares deadpan across the sprawling topography of Palmetto State. The campus is dim in the evening light, and the wind blows smoke trails back towards his face. Twelve stories high and he barely feels a thing. Andrew spares one flat, cursory glance back at the door as it opens then turns his face towards the slowly sinking sun.

He’s wearing the armbands Andrew gave him. His hair is still slick from his shower; dark-auburn and curled wet at his ears, a fly-away strand at his cheek. He needs a haircut and won’t let anyone come near him with scissors but Andrew.

Andrew hates him.

Bee said: “You’re intelligent, Andrew. I don’t need to tell you what you already know. You hate the way he makes you feel. You hate that you aren’t in control.” A hint of a smile sat at the corner of her mouth. She was pleased and didn’t quite care if he knew it. He watched it wobble precariously and stifled a sharp jolt of annoyance a second too late - something he’d found himself consciously doing more often than prefered.

Andrew said: “I do not want to talk about him anymore.” Bee accepted this without missing a beat and offered him a hot-chocolate refill, testament to her competence as his designated handler.

Bee was court-appointed psychiatrist number thirteen. She’d asked, initially, if he was superstitious. Drugged to the gills and beyond he laughed in her face, sardonic and mocking, his lips pulled white against his teeth. 

Everything was too fast and too slow and too much, then. Mid-May at Palmetto, settled into dorms with a brand-new prescription - experimental - and a parole officer on his ass. 

His brain marinated in molasses and syrup, his pulse spiked high with adrenaline. His body trembled unceasingly with nervous energy. Bee promptly halved his dosage, her first act as his psychiatrist. The single virtue of his medication - it made people far less irritating.

Sober now, Bee near tops his list of tolerable people - which starts with Renee and ends with Nicky - because she knows when to stop prodding. Neil does not. Or more accurately: he knows, and prods further still. 

Neil is not a tolerable person. 

Andrew wagers he’s about to start at it any second. Silence is another line of communication between them, somewhere between rare moments of candor and the juvenile, grudging game of secrets they no longer really need. It comes in different weights, and tones, and timbres; meaning that transcends the lexicon of spoken word.

This silence is light and considering. They are mutually aware of one another and Neil deliberates; takes in the stiff, anticipatory set of his shoulders. 

This Neil - laid bare to his team and accepted, absorbed in the familiar routines of practice and schoolwork and friday night movies - delights in the sheer normality of his life. The season is over; the foxes victorious. 

Neil Josten is officially an American citizen, nearly a sophomore and soon to be co-captain; the scars that web his cheeks and arms a worthy trade for his newfound personhood.

This Neil wears orange head to toe and he suits it. This Neil drips truth from his lips like nectar and treasures that which he learns in return; no matter how bland, how mundane. The back-and-forth nature of friendship enthralls him. He tested for a real license if only to have a pocket-sized affirmation of his name, his identity, and Andrew’s never seen anyone so blatantly excited to pay taxes.

Neil strides towards the ledge with light, jaunty steps and folds his legs beneath him, a foot of space in between them. The expression he turns on Andrew is at once ridiculously earnest; he would wonder, had he not once been the same, how a person could deal so thoroughly in extremes. 

Neil plucks Andrew’s cigarette from between his fingers and considers it. Rolls it between his fingers, breathes in the scent. The ash dislodges in one fine clump, and Neil puts it out on the concrete. He flicks it over the edge, looks at him expectantly. 

Andrew still doesn’t exactly know what Neil is searching for. He reaches out and pinches hair between forefinger and thumb, stares disdainfully. “I’m surprised you can see through this mess,” he drawls. 

Bee would tell him he’s avoiding emotional intimacy. To Neil, it is enough. 

“I can see the ball on the court. I don’t have to look Kevin in the eyes when he bitches at me. I don’t have to see whatever horrible movie Allison’s got on in the common room.”

“Really,” Andrew says evenly. “I would have thought you’d enjoy chick flicks, what with all your rampant idealism. Is that why you aren’t inside, playing with your teammates?”

Neil wrinkles his nose. “Our teammates. And I’m not an idealist.”

“Need I remind you that you put your head on a cutting board for a team sport?” 

“I put my head on a cutting board for my team. For the people I care about.” Neil says pointedly. 

Andrew concedes with a blank stare and a light exhalation, withdraws his hand from the loose curls at the base of Neil’s neck. “I will cut it for you tomorrow.” 

Neil nods vaguely in response, knees tucked tight to his chest and eyes fixed on the horizon, dreamy and dim. 

It’s the height that’s making Andrew’s pulse race. He lights another cigarette and doesn’t protest when Neil takes it from his fingers, loose and ply.


End file.
